One Message RemainsOne Message Remains

"Award-winning author Premee Mohamed delivers more science-infused, dystopian speculative fiction in this hard-hitting collection of four interlinked stories. All are set in the Treotan Empire, a kingdom intent on colonizing everything it can reach. Mohamed offers a range of perspectives that, taken together, give a sense of what life is like for many vastly different kinds of people as they struggle to survive and do what they believe is right under the empire's oppressive reign. In "One Message Remains," Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them--and they have chosen their weapons well. In "The Weight of What is Hollow," Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor. Finally, in "Forsaking All Others," ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother's village, he is joined by a fellow deserter--and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself." --